People Still Buy Music: Lack of anticipation kills Kanye's second-week sales numbers

Turns out all that Yeezus anticipation fell away pretty quickly once it was released. Kanye West’s sales dropped 80 percent from week one to week two, with his newest album moving just 65,000 copies this week, compared to 327,000 the week of its debut. That marks the biggest sales drop-off for an artist in more than a year, after Madonna’s MDNA fell 87 percent during its second week. (Of course, all this will probably be moot when Jay-Z’s Magna Carta Holy Grail goes from selling more than a million copies its first week out to something under 100,000 its second week, but whatever.)

Those 65,000 copies sold landed West the No. 3 spot on this week’s Billboard charts, behind Wale’s No. 1 The Gifted and J. Cole’s steadily performing Born Sinner at No. 2. Shitty Christian rock band Skillet came in fourth with its eighth studio album, Rise, 60,000 copies of which were sold to people with no taste.

Billboard also just released its cumulative sales charts for the first half of the year, with Justin Timberlake's The 20/20 Experience easily outpacing Bruno Mars' Unorthodox Jukebox for No. 1 record of the year so far. 20/20 is the only record to have sold more than a million copies in 2013, with 2.04 million moved to date. Mumford & Sons' Babel comes in third, despite being released in September of last year: In 2013 alone, it's sold more than 884,000 copies, putting its cumulative total at 2.35 million.

Unsurprisingly, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis' "Thrift Shop" is the most popular single of the year so far, with something like 5.58 million copies of the track sold as of the end of June.